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Good morning everyone. A long time ago, British Airways had a promotion with Match.com where you could earn 150 British Airways Avios per dollar spent. The following story talks about my struggle to get the British Airways Avios I was owed. Be prepared, this is a very long post. I hope you enjoy.

Since the Match.com promotion was 150x, I wanted my Match.com membership to be as large as possible, so I prepaid for 12 months of membership along with a bunch of extras. The total came out to $548.57 and I should have earned 82,286 British Airways Avios, or a cost of 0.67 CPM.

I completed my purchase and was a Match.com member as of March 2.

Here is a breakdown of all the Match.com membership features and their costs.

The purchase was tracking nicely in the British Airways Avios eStore, but the number of Avios was lower than expected. I was hoping that when the transaction was approved, the correct number of Avios would be deposited to my British Airways Avios eStore account.

A few weeks later, I logged into my British Airways Avios eStore account and saw that the transaction was declined. What was going on?

I immediately reached out to British Airways and Match.com on Twitter for help.

According to the Twitter conversation I had, British Airways handles all claims within 14 days and handles the claims by order date.

I received an automated response from Match.com. Based on the keywords I used in my email, they assumed I had an issue with my daily matches. Luckily, there was info at the bottom of the email that told me to respond to that automated email if I still needed help. I copied and pasted my first email to Match.com and sent it off.

On July 13, I received a response from Match.com that said they were escalating my concern to the refund review department. I thought that was interesting since I never mentioned a refund in any of my emails, but if Match.com wanted to give me a refund, I would not object.

On July 17, I received an email from Match.com that they were issuing a full refund of $548.57 back to my credit card.

On July 18, the refund posted to my credit card.

When I originally signed up for Match.com, I wasn’t expecting much. I signed up entirely for the British Airways Avios, but since I was a paying customer (at the time), I decided to use the service and see what happened. A few weeks into my Match.com membership, I met an amazing girl named Laura that I am happy to call my girlfriend. After our second date, I told her that I signed up for Match.com for the miles. By then, she knew about my travel blog and my obsession with credit card rewards. I told her that when the British Airways Avios posted to my account, I would use the miles to take us on a cool trip (Hawaii perhaps), but unfortunately, British Airways & Match.com had other plans.

Long story short, I was on Match.com for a few months, met my amazing girlfriend Laura, and got all my money back after dozens of emails and weeks of fighting. In the end, it was worth all the headache.

If you have any questions about the British Airways Avios eStore or Match.com, please leave a comment below. Have a great day everyone!

So, I see you couldn’t resist writing about this!! LOL!! Well, congratulations on the new girl friend. She’s a cutie!!
As you may remember from our conversation on FB, I finally got my Avios back in my account for the Match.com promo to the tune of 34,184 Avios! This is a number I remember well due to the many, many times I had to use it in email correspondence with BA and Match. I am sorry you didn’t get your Avios, but somehow I feel you should have enough points and miles to take your new sweetie on a tremendous Hawaiian vacation soon! If not, let me know. I have some extra Avios in my account!

Grant, look at that smile on your face, and she’s really cute. I’m sorry the Avios deal didn’t work out for you and I really appreciate your post. Ultimately, you ended up financially whole, with the BEST EVER unexpected “perk” as the end result. Happy for you!!

So I had an equally frustrating experience. I did the $245 membership and went in to pending. I contacted the BA shopping portal (same Eric guy) and went back and forth and actually got my points. Around the same time got my refund. I thought I actually pulled one over on BA until fast forward 2 months and they took the points back….leaving my BA account -29,000. I had used the Avios for a first class ticket over xmas on AA. After much back and forth between BA customer service, they basically said at some point the computer will cancel the reservations unless my balance is positive. Luckily i ended up catching the Amex transfer promo, but still was a lot of work for basically zero results.

awesome story! Good thing it worked out for you in at least one way in the end. Kinda reminded me of when I was trying to get back the 100k Amex points that they clawed back, except I still didn’t get the points nor a girl, lol. So you’re still good :)

I used a miles and points offer to sign up for match.com a few years ago, so I was (thankfully) ineligible for this offer.
Through that offer, I met someone within a couple weeks of signing up. We were married this February.

You have more patience than I. I would have opened a credit card dispute on this issue a few weeks after the BA shopping site rejected my claim. At least the dispute will cause a little pain and extra fees for match. If enough people who were part of this promo did that, then Amex would review the merchant and perhaps cause them to do the right thing.

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